Market Perspectives

Tips for CFOs Who Want to Turbo-Charge Their Job Search Efforts

In a previous article (The Invisible Job Market for Financial Executives), I discussed the lack of protocol around recruiting a finance executive in the world of small and medium sized enterprises. However, SMEs do have one common theme when it comes to recruiting a CFO or vice president of finance – they tend to take the path of least resistance. These various paths include reaching out to their accounting firm, personal networking and job board postings. The virtue of these approaches is that they require very little investment, both in terms of time and money.…

Are you hiring a CFO? Calculating Compensation Within Private Companies

Are you hiring a CFO? Calculating Compensation Within Private Companies

Hiring a top notch CFO, someone who will advance your company’s agenda and business objectives, requires strategic thinking on a number of fronts, not least of which is compensation. Not only will a well thought out compensation plan bring the best candidate to the table, it will align your CFO properly with your company’s interests. This is especially true for private companies where the CFO can have a significant impact on the overall success of the business. When structuring your CFO’s compensation plan, your main considerations should be:

Taking the Average (and Bad) CFO Hire Out of Play

Companies going to market to recruit a financial executive can trip over any number of small snags. Recruiting an executive tends to be more complicated than most business endeavors due to the large human component involved in the transaction. Even after all the tangibles have been addressed, like education, technical qualifications, and industry experience, you still need to understand the intangibles, like personality and cultural fit.

Most snags don’t cause the search in question to go off the rails; usually, they just add extra time and expense to the process.…

I’m An Underpaid CPA CA – How Do I Deal With That In A Job Interview?

Straight Answers to Real Questions

Question: I’m a qualified CPA CA with almost three years of experience in industry since leaving public practice. I didn’t take the traditional route to getting my CA designation – I left public accounting when I had fulfilled all of my hours commitments to do some traveling and then wrote the UFEs when I returned to Canada. I took a job as a financial analyst with a large telecommunications company while I was waiting for my UFE results and because I didn’t have my designation at that time, my base pay scale was quite a bit less than it would have been had I already received my CPA designation.…

LinkedIn’s Limitations as a Sole-Source Recruitment Solution

The perception exists that social media in general and LinkedIn in particular, are the solution to every recruitment question. While it’s true that LinkedIn is a very useful site and an important tool for anyone involved with recruitment, it’s not the solution to every recruitment problem.

LinkedIn has two main avenues for in-house recruiters to source candidates. The first and most obvious recruitment tool available is the job posting feature. Postings are relatively inexpensive and are good for a period of thirty days.…

Hiring the CFO in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

When owner-managed companies start out, their accounting needs are few and relatively simple. Cheques need to be cut, invoices need to be collected, people need to get paid, the government needs its taxes and so forth. Actually, most of what needs to be done in the name of accounting could be categorized as bookkeeping which is why owner-managers usually start out by hiring someone with bookkeeping experience to handle the company’s accounting function.

Bookkeeping is simply the clerical function of recording a business’ day to day operations and for owner-managers of small companies, that’s usually all that’s required.…

Peering Over the Expectation Gap

It’s Tuesday morning around 10:00am and a hypothetical VP of Finance (let’s call her Amanda) is at her desk strategizing about replacing her controller who resigned on Friday. She’d already talked to human resources who promised to post the job online and now she’s wondering what else she could be doing to expedite the process. As Amanda is mulling over her options, the phone rings and lo and behold, it’s a placement agency that happens to specialize in accounting and finance inquiring if she might have any openings.…

Why You Want to Hire an Argumentative Recruiter

When I want to buy something out of the ordinary, something not in a “pick it up off the shelf” category, I inevitably want some market intel before I make the purchase. When I was in the market for a house in Toronto many years ago, I wanted the real estate agent to fill me in on neighbourhoods with the best schools, inform me of the relative resale merits of one property over another, plus give me input on a host of other factors that would help me make the best, most informed decision possible.…

What Real Estate and Recruitment Have in Common

I was walking my dog recently and as I ambled down the residential streets of my neighbourhood I noticed a number of realtors’ For Sale or Just Sold signs posted on various properties I passed. And it occurred to me that on the surface, real estate and recruitment had a few things in common.

In both real estate and recruitment there are two parties involved in every deal. In real estate deals, there’s a person listing the property and the person buying the property.…

There’s Never Time to Do It Right, But There’s Always Time to Do It Over

There’s Never Time to Do It Right, But There’s Always Time to Do It Over

A year or so ago I got a call from the CEO of a $50mm roofing contractor who needed to hire a new CFO. The CEO was the son of the founder of the firm, and had been at the helm of the family business for about five years. Dad had ostensibly retired but still came to the office most days. As much as I think he was trying to let his son run the show, my sense was that the father was still pretty involved in day to day operations and executive decisions.…